Sound Instructional Leadership, Dipped in Technology

Monthly Archives: December 2008

The tech team trio of myself, Dean Schuler and Joe Willis met last Thursday on the heels of a district wide tech meeting held that same day. The three of us discussed a veritable cornucopia of topics regarding the state of technology in the district. There were really two main topics that dominated the dialogue at the meeting as they have in the forums; those were the usefulness of the internet filtering system, and the re-purposing of older laptops into mobile labs for student use. As far as the internet filter goes, the three of use discussed a number of options that would make the system more useful for students and teachers, deciding that perhaps the best course of action to take is to assign user accounts to all of the educators in the building. I personally discussed this idea with our superintendent, who was not opposed to the idea. He then requested that I attempt to gather more information from other districts who are operating under similar circumstances.

The other topic that the three of us discussed at length was the use of computer labs and clusters in the building. This conversation was wide reaching and examined many different issues. I was the consensus of the group that the small clusters of computers located in classrooms are widely underused and that a better use of resources would be for the district to focus on moving in the direction of mobile computers and an enhanced wireless network.